The Project
Our challenge was simple; to earn high quality coverage for Gala Casino through a content marketing campaign that would get people talking, and support Gala Casino’s ongoing search marketing campaign.
In order to continue our strong search marketing performance with Gala Casino in this incredibly competitive sector, we proposed a creative and outlandish content marketing campaign that would earn ‘money can’t buy’ coverage for our client on one of the busiest days of the year for online media publications.
This campaign would require multiple teams to come together and execute a campaign that met considerable creative and technical challenges and requirements. The success of this campaign would ultimately support ongoing growth in online traffic and visibility as part of a wider SEO and content strategy.
Our Solution
On April Fool’s Day, we launched a content marketing and PR campaign that would secure coverage in some of the UK’s leading publications.
The key to any successful April Fool’s Day PR campaign is subtlety. We went to great lengths to create a campaign that was interesting, engaging but, above all, ever so slightly believable. The result was the world’s first ice casino. With research suggesting that casinos deliberately keep their venues cool as players experience a ‘warming’ sensation when winning – something which players look to replicate with their next hand – we felt that our Ice Casino, to be constructed under the northern lights in Sweden, was the perfect campaign.
Having developed a realistic and plausible story, detailing the plans from Gala Casino to open the world’s first casino made entirely from ice, we commissioned an artist to create illustrations and artist impression drawings of the ice casino, which would launch later this year in Sweden.
Our artist designed every element, including casino tables, bars and even poker chips, from ice, with detailed drawings and ‘behind the scenes’ imagery created to demonstrate the design process.
What we achieved
On what is traditionally an extremely competitive day in the PR calendar, the Gala Ice Casino concept earned some excellent coverage from both mainstream and specialist media, as well as creating an impressive level of social media buzz.
This activity resulted in 15 pieces of high quality coverage, including titles such as The Mirror, Daily Telegraph and Daily Record.
The activity smashed the target Hitwise traffic figure of 140,000, earning a cumulative Hitwise Traffic of 27,326,291 and an average domain authority of 60. The activity also earned a cumulative social reach of 6,564,628.
Ultimately, this campaign offered huge value to the SEO campaign as they have generated money-can’t-buy links on highly authoritative, highly trafficked sites.
